What are amp plugins not doing?

[MirrorProfiles]

But personally, I'd still rather be able to turn on an RTA to see what's actually happening and know what that particular instance is doing to my sound at a glance without having to squint at little dots on little knobs

IMO this is a grass is greener situation - Fabfilter is basically everything you want already.

If FabFilter limited the parameters and value ranges to reflect specific pieces of hardware, that would totally work for me too.

Equilibrium and Kirchoff are a bit more set up to do this, but the novelty wears off quickly IMO. Equilibrium RULES but for reasons beyond just having various eq behaviours modelled. I’d recommend trying them, to scratch the itch at least.

That controller looks pretty cool! Have you tried Softube Console 1? I bought that with the expectation of having hands on control for loads of EQ’s in my plugin collection. I think these days it supports way more beyond Softube and UAD, but as soon as I bought it I just found myself using the default SSL EQ, and not because “it’s an SSL”. As soon as you’re twiddling knobs and listening, your ears are guiding you and you just adjust until it sounds right. Changing the EQ type doesn’t really change much for me once I start actually using it, and often it’s just more stuff to think about that I don’t really want to be - most of the appeal of HW like that is removing the choices and just diving in.

Its the same appeal as an analog desk - I don’t really care what the eq and dynamics are, it’s more that they’re all there in front of you and you’re already adjusting things before you’ve had a chance to even think too much about it.

 

[Orvillain]

It's funny you mention UA, because I see it the exact opposite. Normally, I avoid many of their plugins because they're so close to the original hardware's experience (even when that experience sucks like how some API knobs are nested and upside down!). For example, I'd much rather see a frequency plot in FabFilter Pro-Q than deal with the lack of meaningful feedback from something like Manley's Massive Passive.

Conversely, I really like Paradise's UI—it's much faster and easier to use specifically because it's not chasing the 100% perfect skeuomorphic dragon other UA plugins are notorious for.

I think for me, once you start subtracting from the experience of using the real gear, at a certain point, I'd rather just use the real gear and deal with all of its pain points, because it is so good.

Skeumorphic UI's are beautiful and I love them. They keep my mind in a creative space. Nothing less flow destroying than a plugin that not only is ugly, but you constantly have to re-read to make sure you know what you're doing. When you couple that with it being a plugin where you can't achieve what you want to achieve without jumping through tons of hoops and options.... absolute flow killer.

I feel similarly about my Axe FX III sometimes. I can think up and forget half a dozen riffs or melody ideas in the time it takes to setup a controller on the hardware, for example.

RE: UA - their Distressor plugin is the GOAT for making me feel like I'm using a real compressor, and contrary to what @MirrorProfiles said about T-Racks and VMR, I see a lot of love out there for both platforms, all across the internet, different types of musicians and engineers; everyone really digs those packages. I do too.

 

[Whizzinby]

We can joke, but 17 individual plugins IS much nicer and quicker to work with in a DAW than some container with limited versions of those 17 plugins crammed into a clunky UI and all sounding 20% worse than your favourite emulations. The DAW is a container, we don’t need another one inside it.

All in one plugins are a fetish and there’s a reason why they are all by and large bad. Something has to give with them, and they either accept the limitations and lean into them (HX Native) or they just mindlessly add waffle and bloat (Amplitube/Amp Room/Revalver/S-Gear). God knows how long amp sims have been a thing, but it says a lot that no one has managed to nail it yet. It’s equally true for racks like T Racks or Slate VMR which basically no one speaks glowingly of either.

I get the perspective, and I don’t mind getting into the weeds occasionally, but I think the average player would much prefer a suite out of pure convenience. (Look no further than this thread)

I think if given the option of Helix Native or Helix 2,327 individuals amps/effects, most people are just going to go with Native. And for the 2% that chose Individual it would take about 3 days before one of them posted “They should release a container plug”.

 

[Jarick]

Big upside of a suite is you can potentially run in standalone mode which is nice and simple.

I can see the arguments to split up into different sections...if you have a lot of effects you use it can be easier to just run them as you like. Even then though, I think having a stack of plugins that you have to click on which pops up a different window is a much less fun experience than just working within a single plugin and clicking on say the stomp box section to see virtual pedals pop up.

 

[Digital Igloo]

IMO this is a grass is greener situation - Fabfilter is basically everything you want already.
Equilibrium and Kirchoff are a bit more set up to do this, but the novelty wears off quickly IMO. Equilibrium RULES but for reasons beyond just having various eq behaviours modelled. I’d recommend trying them, to scratch the itch at least.

That controller looks pretty cool! Have you tried Softube Console 1? I bought that with the expectation of having hands on control for loads of EQ’s in my plugin collection. I think these days it supports way more beyond Softube and UAD, but as soon as I bought it I just found myself using the default SSL EQ, and not because “it’s an SSL”. As soon as you’re twiddling knobs and listening, your ears are guiding you and you just adjust until it sounds right. Changing the EQ type doesn’t really change much for me once I start actually using it, and often it’s just more stuff to think about that I don’t really want to be - most of the appeal of HW like that is removing the choices and just diving in.

Its the same appeal as an analog desk - I don’t really care what the eq and dynamics are, it’s more that they’re all there in front of you and you’re already adjusting things before you’ve had a chance to even think too much about it.

Yeah, I like the Softube stuff a lot. The perfect controller for me wouldn't be channel strip-centric, however; it'd work equally for softsynths, drum machines, sound libraries, weird effects, etc.

 

[Orvillain]

The other thing is, individual plugins cannot do any kind of inter-block communication. So your virtual fuzz cannot load the virtual amp model, because it's literally an entirely different processor. That means no impedance loading or any of the other things that typically get guitarists floaty in the brain.

I just tend to think that a guitar rig should be thought of as an individual box, and once you've got the thing sounding how you want it, you close the box and move onto thinking about the next thing. I really don't like seeing dozens of plugins on every channel in my DAW. I want nice self contained experiences that don't break my flow state and don't make me constantly context switch.

Having to jump from the Fabfilter experience, to the UA experience, to the Neural experience, to the Line6 experience, to the DAW experience.. oh shit, I'm using Reaper and it just crashed again....

Nah. Chairman laow that, from a guitarist perspective.

From an engineering perspective, absolutely.

 

[metropolis_4]

Well your perspective makes me think "okay... so what is software failing at, that this guy hasn't kept up with the advances in the last 20 years?" because genuinely - your NDSP plugins, your Fractal Icons, your Line6 Natives.. they're really not any different than the related hardware solution, as long as you have a decent-ish computer and soundcard, you can get amazing sounds straight into a DAW these days.

Which I agree, was not true back in 2006. It was mostly just "okay"

PS - I've used software amp sims on pretty much every release I've ever done, to a greater or lesser extent! Last album by my old band I even used a Kemper for some cleans!

My gear needs are about 99% for playing live. I rarely record. I used a MacBook rig running Ableton and plugins with KMI and Novation controllers as my live gigging rig for a while, but I eventually switched to something different because I wasn’t thrilled with some of the tones and the ability to control what I wanted. The biggest sound problem I had was there didn’t seem to be good synergy between different parts of the rig.

After I moved on to different rig approaches for my live rig I just stopped paying attention to the plugin world because I don’t have any use for them. It’s probably not fair, but in my mind I still think of them as the bottom of the pile of digital options because of my last experience using them.

 

[MirrorProfiles]

The other thing is, individual plugins cannot do any kind of inter-block communication. So your virtual fuzz cannot load the virtual amp model, because it's literally an entirely different processor. That means no impedance loading or any of the other things that typically get guitarists floaty in the brain.

Things with freely assignable and moveable blocks are almost always cack when it comes to handling things like external sidechain. They’re also generally pretty bad at dealing with specific routing and panning. Plus mapping external controls and automation gets messy - you either have to assign parameters yourself, or go through a humongous list of parameters.

Fundamentally, I don’t think there is any company who is knocking every module type out of the park. Even if there hypothetically was a company who simply had the BEST tuner, the best wah’s, the best fuzzes, the best drives, the best amps, the best cab engine, the best modulations, the best delays, the best reverbs, the best GUI’s, the best presets, I’d still prefer individual blocks.

The no.1 request for Slate VMR was for the modules to be broken out into individual ones. The whole thing of a rack of a few modules, followed by another plugin, followed by another plugin that’s just called VMR gets so messy.

Plus to load an actual module you have to go through 2 rounds of assigning what you want, rather than one.

I get the benefits for standalone, and somewhat for presets, although I’d argue for a plugin these aren’t primary functions and shouldn’t compromise a plugins use in a DAW.

The best plugin tuner is not part of a suite.

The best cabinet sim plugin is not part of a suite.

It’s more contentious to rank the best effects, although I’d still argue those are standalone plugins. Same goes for amps and drives, but the benefit is being able to mix and match your favourites rather than picking from a pool of “that’ll do”. As a suite, I don’t mind STL Amphub, because using it in a basic way doesn’t feel as much of a compromise - Helix feels empty with lots of small/bland areas if you only use a single module. amplitube is a bukake of information at any one point. STL has enough to build most straightforward preset types, and gets out of the way if you’re combining it with something else.

I really don't like seeing dozens of plugins on every channel in my DAW. I want nice self contained experiences that don't break my flow state and don't make me constantly context switch.

This is fetish stuff. It’s a nice idea but the reality isn’t really bringing much, besides a worse UI and a slower workflow. I think in actual use, you’ll find that you need something outside of the ecosystem. So you might have 2 containers with a plugin or two in between.

I could sort of understand a suite aimed at:

- just pre FX (maybe offering some routing that would be finicky to do), but the choice of fx and routing would have to be going for a very specific sound (rather than a playground of everything

- just post FX. Similar thing. Maybe with some novel approaches to routing and panning.

- Just amps and cabs

 

[ian_dissonance]

Having the best of everything doesn’t really matter if the workflow is poop from a butt, though.

 

[Orvillain]

This is fetish stuff.

I don't really know what that means to be honest.

 

[Digital Igloo]

RE: UA - their Distressor plugin is the GOAT for making me feel like I'm using a real compressor, and contrary to what @MirrorProfiles said about T-Racks and VMR, I see a lot of love out there for both platforms, all across the internet, different types of musicians and engineers; everyone really digs those packages. I do too.

I use UA's Distressor all the time and love it but I can't quite give it (or the original hardware) GOAT status because of those $%#%$@ Fender knobs that are impossible to see how they're set at a glance. For the love of god, if you go with knobs they better have indicator lines, not numbers that line up with some other indicator line. Same reason SoundToys' Devil-Loc loses a point.

 

[Chocol8]

Is okay. I am too!

No, I am 100% positive that you definitely are not okay!

I don't really know what that means to be honest.

I think it means he REALLY likes feet or something like that.

 

[kvik]

My main gripes with plugins and why I stopped using them has less to do with plugins themselves and more with the PC environment in which they work.

• I hate that I have to worry about input level matching.
• I hate that I have to worry about sample rates and buffer sizes.
• I hate that I have to buy a $1000+ audio interface and a $2000+ computer to approach anywhere near reasonable end-to-end latency.
• I hate that I have to basically dedicate that $2000+ computer to playing and recording alone and tune it accordingly to not fuck up at the most inopportune time due to dumb reasons like it going to sleep during recording.
• I hate that despite doing everything above I still can't quite trust the computer, because at the core it's still a generic tin can running generic software not made for any specific purpose and thus with no reasonable way to estimate its limits. The only way to find the limits is by getting screwed and then dialing things down and hoping for the best until next time you make any change.

 

[MirrorProfiles]

My main gripes with plugins and why I stopped using them has less to do with plugins themselves and more with the PC environment in which they work.

• I hate that I have to worry about input level matching.
• I hate that I have to worry about sample rates and buffer sizes.
• I hate that I have to buy a $1000+ audio interface and a $2000+ computer to approach anywhere near reasonable end-to-end latency.
• I hate that I have to basically dedicate that $2000+ computer to playing and recording alone and tune it accordingly to not fuck up at the most inopportune time due to dumb reasons like it going to sleep during recording.
• I hate that despite doing everything above I still can't quite trust the computer, because at the core it's still a generic tin can running generic software not made for any specific purpose and thus with no reasonable way to estimate its limits. The only way to find the limits is by getting screwed and then dialing things down and hoping for the best until next time you make any change.

Is any of this actually true? An M4 Mac Mini is way overkill for running amp sims, and IMO latency is a long solved problem as far as interfaces go. $2000 would get you a pretty serious recording platform.

HW modellers still need extra money spent on them to actually hear what you’re playing, and probably end up benefit from having a computer, interface etc to edit them. Even with the $2000 HW modellers out there, I don’t think they surpass any plugins out there tonally or what’s possible with combining sounds.

I’m also surprised buffers and sample rates provide any real world issue - they mostly take care of themselves, and any manual intervention takes less time than what it takes for my AxeFX to boot up.

I find I spend more time with HW modellers configuring routing so I can actually hear what I’m playing through how I want. Plus navigating my presets, loading and managing IR’s etc all adds a barrier.

I’d also say the whole input level thing with plugins needn’t pose any issue in 2026 but that’s quite gear dependent I guess.

 

[ian_dissonance]

You can get playable latency on a 10 year old MacBook Air and a Scarlett 2i2. If you’re on PC system maintenance is part of the deal.

 

[kvik]

So the conclusion remains that I need to have a dedicated machine (now specifically Mac, which I otherwise wouldn't touch with a remote) and an interface that alone would set me back about as much as the best hardware modelers? Just to get a thing that's worse for most purposes other than endless reamping of takes in my bedroom?

The way I see and use these things the comparisons don't even make sense. So not sure what I'm even doing here other than expressing that using amp plugins as a whole has by far been the most annoying experience I had with guitar tech.

 

[Orvillain]

Mac, which I otherwise wouldn't touch with a remote

Well er.. you wouldn't need to. You'd have a remote.

<ducks>

 

[JiveTurkey]

There's a middle ground between I HAVD TO SPEND $9K TO BE USABLE and GRABB A REFURB WIN 7 LABTOB OF CRAGLIST DUMMBY.

I still sit firmly in the turn on an amp, some pedals and have fun camp. If the point is just to be able to play. Obviously if you need plug capability; an amp is not going to serve that purpose.

 

[MirrorProfiles]

So the conclusion remains that I need to have a dedicated machine (now specifically Mac, which I otherwise wouldn't touch with a remote) and an interface that alone would set me back about as much as the best hardware modelers? Just to get a thing that's worse for most purposes other than endless reamping of takes in my bedroom?

No one said that. You were saying that you need a $2000 computer. I'd be amazed if what you had already isn't sufficient, but if so there's plenty of options that cost less than that. Having a preference for HW is fine but it's probably better to focus on genuine reasons rather than a made up justification for it. My grandparents probably preferred using a Nokia over an iPhone for similar reasons.

 

[ian_dissonance]

Yeah, no dedicated machine needed, just don’t run 15 tabs in chrome and your video editing software at the same time you want to use plugins. And even if a machine is just for internet and spreadsheets I would still recommend stripping windows of the bullshit it comes with, that’s just good practice. Some people really overthink this.